[8] They lived in settlements established alongside the Neponset River estuary, which was a plentiful source of fish, including trout; they also gathered shellfish from the riverbed, and hunted beaver and deer.

[20] In 1634 Israel Stoughton built one of the earliest grist mills in America on the Neponset River; Richard Callicott founded a trading post nearby.

In 1641, Dorcas ye blackmore, an enslaved servant to Israel Stoughton, was the first recorded African American to join a church in New England.

She served as an evangelist to Stoughton's Native American servants, and the First Parish Church of Dorchester attempted to help Dorcas gain her freedom.

In 1765, Irish chocolate maker John Hannon (or alternatively spelled "Hannan" in some sources) imported beans from the West Indies and refined them in Dorchester.

[24]: 627 [25][26][27] Before the American Revolution, "The Sons of Liberty met in August 1769 at the Lemuel Robinson Tavern, which stood on the east side of the upper road (Washington St.) near the present Fuller Street.

In the 1840s and 1850s, a new wave of development took place on a strip of waterfront overlooking Dorchester Bay (Park and Mill streets at the Harrison Square Historic District, later known as Clam Point.)

Renowned architects who contributed to one of the most significant and intact collections of Clam Point's Italianate mansards include Luther Briggs, John A.

By the 1890s, Clam Point gained prominence as a summer resort: the Russell House hotel was its centerpiece and the Dorchester Yacht Club was established on Freeport Street.

It pumped waste to a remote treatment facility on Moon Island in Boston Harbor, and served as a model for other systems worldwide.

The pumping station is architecturally significant as a Richardsonian Romanesque designed by Boston City architect, George Clough.The only remaining 19th-century building on Columbia Point, the headworks is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[36] In the early 20th century, Dorchester received numerous Catholic immigrants from a variety of nations, such as Ireland, French Canada, Italy, and Poland.

In addition, it was a destination for thousands of mostly Protestant African Americans from the South who were making the Great Migration to northern industrial cities for work opportunities and to escape Jim Crow violence.

[citation needed] In the early 1950s, Dorchester became a center of civil rights activism by African Americans, who were constrained by de facto segregation in Boston.

[46] In 1977, after an unsuccessful bid by Cambridge to have the John F. Kennedy Library located there, close to the late president's alma mater Harvard University, a site was chosen at the tip of Columbia Point and ground was broken.

[citation needed] On March 30, 2015, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate was dedicated by President Barack Obama.

[51] The southern part of Dorchester is primarily a residential area, with established neighborhoods still defined by parishes, and occupied by families for generations.

Up until the 1960s, the Blue Hill Avenue part of Dorchester from Roxbury to Mattapan was primarily composed of Jewish Americans whose ancestors had immigrated from eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

During the 1920s–1960s, many African Americans moved from the South to the North during the Great Migration and settled on Blue Hill Avenue and nearby sections.

The Blue Hill Avenue area was "redlined" so that only the newly arriving African Americans would receive mortgages for housing in that section.

In Neponset, the southeast corner of the neighborhood, as well as parts of Savin Hill in the north and Cedar Grove in the south, Irish Americans maintain the most visible identity.

Western, central and parts of southern Dorchester have a large Caribbean population (especially people from Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago).

[56] In recent years Dorchester has also seen an influx of young residents, gay men and women, and working artists (in areas such as Lower Mills, Ashmont Hill/Peabody Square, and Savin Hill).

Over the last decade, the Dorchester branch of the Red Line had major renovations, including four rapid transit stations being rebuilt at Savin Hill, Fields Corner, Shawmut, and Ashmont.

[70][71] Interstate 93 (concurrent with Route 3 and U.S. 1) runs north–south through Dorchester between Quincy, Massachusetts, and downtown Boston, providing access to the eastern edge of Dorchester at Columbia Road, Morrissey Boulevard (northbound only), Neponset Circle (southbound only), and Granite Avenue (with additional southbound on-ramps at Freeport Street and from Morrissey Blvd at Neponset).

In 1984, the City of Boston gave control of it to a private developer, Corcoran-Mullins-Jennison, who redeveloped the property into a residential mixed-income community called Harbor Point Apartments which was opened in 1988 and completed by 1990.

In 2009, then-owner The New York Times Company put the paper up for bid, leading to concern from local community members, who had seen other major employers close their doors.

[115] Residents and activists have worked on issues of public safety, high crime rate, poor educational resources, and lack of housing for low-income families.

[116] Mayor Marty Walsh proposed a budget for 2017 which included a five-year capital plan intended to make improvements to the infrastructure of Dorchester.

The rest of the budget is intended to be used to complete already started projects in Savin Hill, King Street, Hemenway, Dower Avenue, and Ronan Park.